March 25
Personality and Workplace Missions
Topics: Why missions matter. Links between personality and mission. Non-negotiable values and career anchors. Writing a life/work mission statement. The concept of "flow". Connecting personal and organizational missions. The nature of change. Navigating personal and organizational change.
Life/work missions
Here’s
a thought question for you. What
do nearly all successful people have in common?
(Hint: it’s not money,
because money isn’t necessarily the best or the only marker of success in
life.)
The surprising answer? They have a clear sense of what their life is all about, what really matters (versus what only seems to matter) to them. Why? Because they’ve taken the time to write a personal mission statement for their life and work. Have you?
Viktor
Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning) is famous for noting that success
and meaning are not synonyms. They are more or less independent elements
or dimensions of life: success is external (what others say about you),
meaning is internal (what you say -- or, if you are a person of faith, what God
says -- about you). Since success is external, it can be taken away
from you in a way that meaning cannot.
Suffering is inherently linked to meaning; in fact Frankl might argue that one cannot have one without the other. Suffering is not viewed as a problem as such or as a neurotic symptom, but as part and parcel of the human condition that can lead to growth. It can be a paradoxical route to the achievement of meaning. Even a life that is not marked by evident suffering has to deal with the transitoriness, and the seeming arbitrariness, of life: we cannot have all the possibilities, we are forced to make choices, things don't always work out as we plan or wish (though often, with the wisdom of hindsight, better than we could have engineered for ourselves), we must confront our finitude. This constitutes our "response-ability", for we are forced to find (or concretize) meaning through deciding. "You are committed: you must wager" (Pascal).
In class, you’ll be guided through a process of developing a personal mission statement. But as a warmup, make a list of five famous people you admire – people you have tried to model your life after in some way. Here (because it isn't fair for me to ask you to engage in self-disclosure if I don't model that behavior) is my own list:
Viktor Frankl (1905-1997): Psychiatrist, author, concentration camp survivor, and founder of the "logotherapy" movement. Best known for his work Man's Search for Meaning (originally titled From Death Camp to Existentialism). Believed that the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor should be balanced with a Statue of Responsibility off the coast of Los Angeles.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936): British man of letters, known as the "prince of paradox", whose writings are best exemplified by The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith. Maintained warm, active relationships with H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw, with both of whom he violently disagreed philosophically.
Isabel Briggs Myers (1897-1980): Co-developer of the now famous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Along with her mother, single-handedly took on the psychological establishment and won. Also a prolific creative writer and, like me, an INFP. "I dream that long after I'm gone, my work will go on helping people," she said in her last public statement.
Peter Drucker (1909- ) Still active as a management consultant at the age of 93, Drucker launched the study of organizational management and has been tremendously influential as a social analyst for more than sixty years. A famous quote is, "If you can't replicate something because you don't understand it, then it really hasn't been invented."
Athanasius (296-373): Stood almost completely alone against the philosophic tenor of his times, hence the epithet contra mundum associated with him: "It is not the world against Athanasius, it is Athanasius against the world". Saved Western civilization by removing a single letter i from early drafts of the Nicene Creed.
Honorable mentions: Black Elk (1863-1950), Cleveland Amory (1917-1998), William Glasser (1925- ), Richard John Neuhaus (1935- ), and Harriet Tubman (1820-1913). Sorry to disappoint you, but Britney Spears (1981- ) did not even come close to getting on the list. But I'd try to make room somewhere for conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel (1990- ).
In class, we'll learn how to analyze a list like this and mine it for clues about your personal mission.
How
might you go about writing a personal mission statement? There are many
ways to approach this challenge, but one of the best is to imagine yourself at
the end of your life – a good, long life that turned out as well as you could
reasonably imagine it could. (Career
counselors call this a “realistic best-case scenario”.
The word “realistic” is important here:
don’t go off on a total fantasy trip.
You probably won’t win the lottery, be chosen as the Secretary General
of the United Nations, marry Britney Spears or Leonardo di Caprio, or be the
first person to travel to the planet Neptune.
These aren’t impossible scenarios, but how likely are they?)
If you were writing the story of your life, starting from birth and going
on from the present to finish the story as it might turn out under ideal
conditions, how would your life story end?
Be optimistic – the future doesn’t have to look like the past, and
you’re not chained to it – but also rational in imagining how the story
might turn out.
Sidebar:
while we’re not including this as a formal assignment, writing your own
brief autobiography in this way is a very good way to get a bird’s-eye
view of your past, present, and possible future.
We recommend a “quick and dirty” version inspired by the classic
Gregory Peck movie The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.
In that film, the character played by Gregory Peck is applying for a job
as an advertising executive. Instead
of conducting a traditional interview, the company president hands Peck a
typewriter (this was the 1950’s, after all, back when Power Point was just a
thumbtack and Bill Gates was just a gleam in his father’s eye) and a sheaf of
paper. “You have one hour,” he
said, setting a timer. “Write
your autobiography. I’ll be back
in sixty minutes to pick it up.” This
is an extremely productive exercise – forcing yourself to cover your entire
life in only one hour is a great way to cut through all the unnecessary fluff
and get right to the heart of what your life is really all about.
I make a point of completing this exercise every five
years or so – most recently, this past week (February 19) – and have always found it
astonishingly useful. Try it!
(Besides, if nothing else, you’ll have something to pass on to your
children and grandchildren some day other than some unpaid medical bills.
Don’t let the story of your one-of-a-kind, irreplaceably unique life be
lost to posterity!)
Whether
you write this out, talk it out with a friend (or into the microphone of a tape
recorder), or just think it through, the point is the same:
from the vantage point of your old age (perhaps even your
deathbed?), how do you want to be able to say your life turned out?
(The obvious, logical follow-up question is:
what, then, do you need to begin doing now – this year, this month,
this week, this day – to increase the odds that your life will end in that
fashion?) Please don’t think of
this exercise as “morbid”; it
isn’t. It’s simply a way of
focusing your attention on what really matters – which isn’t usually the
same as what is most pressing or most urgent in your life when viewed from a
short-term perspective.
Of course we’re not implying that you can plan out your entire life; life is bigger than you are, and full of surprises. (What fun would it be otherwise?) Plans can be straitjackets if they keep you from taking advantage of unanticipated possibilities and opportunities, or if they make you so goal-oriented that you can’t kick back, take your shoes off, set a spell, or stop and savor the little moments of life. (I have always liked a short poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that goes like this: “Cling to the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gold or gash, it will not come again in this identical disguise.” When all is said and done, life may very much be about those little moments – not the big splashy accomplishments. Or, put more simply: “On their deathbed, no one ever wishes that they had spent more time at the office.”) The idea isn’t that you can plan everything; the idea is that you need a sense of general, guiding values and priorities that can then guide all the little decisions (anticipated and unanticipated) that come your way, that can enable you to separate the wheat from the psyllium.
In class, a formal structure will be provided to help you to complete this exercise. In completing it, you just might find that your true life priorities aren't quite what you thought they were... and that's always a useful piece of self-knowledge. Come to think of it, if a private investigator followed you around for a week videotaping your behavior (but without talking to you directly), would s/he be able to tell what your five highest life priorities are from observing what you do, not what you say? (“If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” – not just think about them.) If the answer is no, what are you willing to do about it? When do you intend to start?
The concept of "flow"
Myers (2000), a leading proponent of the modern "positive psychology" movement, argues forcefully that psychology has been historically focused on pathology, not health. For instance, an electronic search of Psychological Abstracts, covering more than a century of published findings in the field, yielded nearly 137,000 articles about negative emotions like anger, anxiety, and depression, but only 9,500 articles about positive emotions. Depression alone was mentioned over 70,000 times in the abstracts; joy, a mere 850 times! The surprising result is that we know much more about what can go wrong (and how) with the human experience than what can go right (and how). The positive psychology movement is an attempt to redress this imbalance.
People are, if opinion surveys can be trusted, much happier than the experts predict them to be. With a surprising amount of longitudinal consistency, about 30% of Americans describe themselves as "very happy" and an additional 60% as "generally happy" or "fairly happy". More than 80% describe themselves as more happy than unhappy.
One goal of the positive psychology movement is to help answer the question, "What makes people happy?" and thus "How can human happiness be facilitated?" Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, external circumstances are not the best determinant of happiness. For instance, wealth is a poor predictor of happiness; even the very rich are only slightly happier as a group than average Americans. Longitudinally, Americans today are no happier as a group than their counterparts in 1940.
Far more predictive of happiness is a sense of meaning and purpose. For instance, people who describe themselves as strongly religious are about twice as likely to describe themselves as "very happy" than those who describe themselves as nonreligious. It appears that the core element of happiness is not positive circumstances, but an outlook on life that allows one to find meaning in the midst of changing circumstances. See Module 7d below for more about the link between meaning and happiness.
What about those rare individuals who are healthier than the rest of us -- what are they like? What is the psychological ideal? What does optimal mental health look like? Is there a consensus among psychologists about what that is and what it means -- and is that consensus a culture-fair or culture-free one?
One thing is clear: optimal health means much more than the absence of pathology. It means the acquisition and utilization of attributes (such as resilience) that are in short supply.
Take a minute to make a list of what you think a "very psychologically healthy" person would be like. (Begin by thinking of what you are like when you are at your very best, then add characteristics that you know you don't have, but wish you did.) Then compare your list to the lists below, drawn from the thinking of various proponents of what today would be called the "positive psychology movement" (went by different names in the past):
Gordon Allport: The "mature person"
Carl Rogers: The "fully functioning person"
Abraham Maslow: The "self-actualizing person"
Erich Fromm: The "productively oriented person"
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: The "autotelic person"
Lawrence Kohlberg: The "postconventional person"
A thought question: Can you translate these characteristics into Big Five terms? And if so, does that contradict the notion that all Big Five profiles are equally good or equally valuable?
What might promote the acquisition of characteristics similar to those above, if you agree that this is a "good" list?
Is the question even a meaningful one? Is there one and only one "healthy" way to be, or are there as many healthy ways to be as there are people?
Social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (don't you just love that name? pronounced "chick-sent-me-high-ee") was interested, like most of the individuals mentioned in this unit, with the question, "Why are some people 'naturally' happier than the rest of us?" He used the so-called Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to have people keep detailed "slice of life" diaries to see if there was any connection between how people spent their time and how happy they were. Besides a few obvious conclusions (eating makes people happy), he found that the major problem in our culture is not too little time, but too much. (This, even though the average American's schedule looks twice as busy as that of his or her counterpart of a century ago, according to William Bridges.) People are good at keeping outwardly busy, but they aren't so good at finding meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in what they do. (The winner of the rat race, as one wit once put it, is still a rat.)
Csikszentmihalyi discovered that the happiest people are those who spend the largest proportion of their time in a state he christened flow. Analogous to what sports figures call being "in the zone", flow occurs when a person is engaged in tasks in which both skills and challenges are high: when they are being stretched almost (but not quite) beyond their capabilities, but are succeeding at it, and receiving real-time, immediate feedback to tell them that they are doing so. (Contrast this with the usual condition of the typical college student sitting in class, and it will lead you to some depressing conclusions about the state of contemporary American education.)
People who learn how to generate their own flow experiences are what Csikszentmihalyi calls autotelic individuals. Because they are more self-directed (less dependent on the exigencies of the external environment), and more able to turn mundane tasks into flow-generating ones (find something interesting even about boring duties), and more able to find motivation through the development of self-chosen goals, they are more capable of finding productive (that is, meaning-generating) ways to structure their time.
The nature of change
Change maven William Bridges, whose name we've encountered more than once before in this course, articulates a three-step model of change. Emphasizing that change is a process, not an instantaneous act, he talks about "endings", the "neutral zone" of the mid-transition period, and "new beginnings". One of the things he emphasizes in his work is that while an individual's personal identity or sense of self is clear during the "ending" and "new beginning" stages, it is fuzzy, ambiguous, and markedly unclear during the middle period of the "neutral zone". This is, in fact, why many people resist change, or move too quickly from an old life to a new one. A good analogy is that of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly; halfway in between these two structures, the insect is mostly liquid (structureless).
In class, some additional information will be provided that outlines specific challenges people face during each of these three transition periods.
Any life change involves two distinct phases: an exploration phase, in which options and possibilities are considered in a divergent manner, and a commitment phase, in which a definite choice is made among these options (which means saying no to most of them, at least for the moment), and the choice implemented in action. Maintaining an appropriate balance between the two can be difficult.
Those who -- out of fear of uncertainty or ambiguity -- jump too quickly to the commitment phase are suffering from premature role commitment, or deciding on an identity too quickly. Those who -- out of fear of commitment or being "trapped" -- stay stuck in the exploration phase are suffering from role diffusion. Can you see why each poses some significant life challenges or problems?